Blogging as open source fact checking, by Jeffrey Veen

Blogging as open source fact checking

For 21 years, Tom Brokaw was the anchor of the NBC Nightly News -- a tenure which saw some dramatic shifts in how people consume media. I saw him speak yesterday, and he talked a bit about when he started in the business; how there where just a couple middle-aged white guys giving news about what was happening on the eastern seaboard. Over those years, reporting the news got more complex, more diverse, and more democratic.

Someone from the audience asked about how the blogosphere has changed the way the nightly news is considered. Brokaw answered unsurprisingly, saying that he believed people were capable of taking a more active role in discerning the trustworthiness of amateur media. But he also talked about the fear that rippled through his newsroom as his contemporary on CBS News, Dan Rather, was being taken down by a thousand passionate blogging fact-checkers. "It cost him his job -- his whole career, really," Brokaw said.

And that's the intriguing part. It's not that the blogosphere is going to remake media in it's image. It's only marginally interesting that Boing-Boing gets more traffic than the Chicago Sun-Times. Those blogs may be the ones grabbing headlines, but there is only a handful of people in that rarified air. No, what's interesting is the way collective blogging is affecting the traditional sources of news in subtle but important ways.

The open source software community often quotes the Linus Law. "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." That is, having multiple people poring over your lines of code is an excellent way find errors. It's not like a thousand people are collaboratively writing database software, but all those people are looking over the shoulders of the few who are.

Blogs are doing that to media. Enough eyeballs are proving it trivially easy to point out shoddy reporting. Dan Rather may have been an early, high-profile prototype, but there are increasingly frequent case studies. Reuters faced this in the Hezbollah Photoshop scandal (examples here and here); countless Apple blogs endlessly debate every scrap of evidence leaked from that company while traditional Macintosh publications whither.

How these organizations respond may very well point to their future success. Will they see these legion bloggers as adversaries? (Think of how Microsoft "competes" with Linux.) Or will they find inspiration in, say, the Digg model, harnessing countless tiny points of participation to harness the collective intelligence of their audience and feeding it back into their product?

Just a hunch, but I'd bet on the latter.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 10 October 2006 at 11:43 AM. It was filed under Business, Technology. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 10 October 2006 at 2:37 PM Sheldon Kotyk wrote:

Excellent post Jeffrey.

What do you think of the media's current habit of going to blogs as an add-on to their reporting?

To me, it seems like they are acknowledging blogs but still not considering the medium as a place where "news" happens, just opinions.

2. On 10 October 2006 at 3:44 PM Sérgio wrote:

Innovation is the keyword.

"Dig style sites" need to point to somewhere, right?

3. On 11 October 2006 at 10:15 PM Rose wrote:

Interesting Post Jeff!

4. On 13 October 2006 at 9:07 AM special k wrote:

It's kind of sadly amusing to hear you on you the podcasts from the web apps conference and in this post line that the Bush service records were proven to be false by a bunch of truth seeking bloggers (which couldn't be farther from the truth in the case of the repeatedly wrong clowns at powerline.com)

did you do any research on mary mapes (the producer of the segment?) before parading the trimuphs of the blogosphere on this one?

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/10/1434202

http://www.truthandduty.com/

http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=4188

you seem like a great guy - but the irony here is kinda thick.

5. On 13 October 2006 at 9:22 AM veen wrote:

Thanks for the links, Special K.

It's not surprising that the story continues beyond the short attention span of most media sources - both traditional and amateur.

The bigger issue here, of course, is that this wouldn't have even been a story where it not for this new platform of interconnected dialogue - the Fourth Estate has its own watchdog now, and it's stronger than market forces such as circulation and ratings.

6. On 13 October 2006 at 11:19 AM special k wrote:

Glad you took the time to post. If there is a victim in this story it was Mapes... The Bush administration never refuted the claims or the documents - let alone the assertions. Unfortunately this wasn't a triumph of the blogosphere - but some might say a low - if we look closer to how fast the powerline guys were "alerted" to the "fakes"... I suspect we begin to get the real story on this one.

Keep up the good work - would be great to see measuremap released to the world someday!

7. On 24 October 2006 at 5:35 AM Robin wrote:

I was actually trying to comment on your post titled 'A contrast in urban design' about Boulder, but I guess that wasn't allowed, so here it is:

I don't know if you will read this, but I'm going to comment anyway :p

I have been to Boulder, but only for a couple of hours and it was very nice indeed. The way you describe it makes it sound like the Netherlands. Bike paths in Holland are practically everywhere, except on the sides of highways. There are actually more bicycles than people over here. Most students I know use them to go to school (or university) and a lot of people go to work by bike.

Speed bumps also seem omnipresent, except for highways and roads where you can do 50 (km/h) or more.

I guess Boulder is kind of like the Netherlands.

Here's my question (or actually, since I'm not really expecting an answer and should probably do my own research, it might be more like thinking out loud): was Boulder designed in the 70s? I'm studing city planning (planologie) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. In Holland, city planning in the seventies was all about the human scale. In a lot of neighbourhoods that were built, car usage was discouraged, as they could only go about 10 - 15 km/h and could only park in special parking spots. The idea was that children should be able to play in the streets without being run over by cars. (These neighbourhoods were called woonerven.) To me, it sounds like Boulder is a stereotypical 70s-style neighbourhood.

Anyway, I should probably get back to reading more of your book. I got it second-hand and it's still good, albeit a bit outdated on certain technologies, but the ideas are still great.

Robin

8. On 24 October 2006 at 5:38 AM Robin wrote: